The following is an adapted version of an article written by Barnabás Leimeiszter, originally published in Magyar Krónika.
In 1942 the Ministry of Defence—in preparation for the expected bombing—commissioned nuclear physicist Zoltán Bay, an Egyesült Izzó collaborator, and a team of about 40 people to carry out secret microwave experiments in the field of communications and aerial reconnaissance.
2023 July saw the release of Christopher Nolan’s much-anticipated film Oppenheimer, which was, to some extent, ‘our Hungarian’ story if we think of the roles of Ede Teller and Leó Szilárd in the Manhattan Project. But you don’t have to go overseas for a cinematic story set during the Second World War featuring Hungarian scientists. In 1942 the Ministry of Defence—preparing for the expected bombing—commissioned nuclear physicist Zoltán Bay, an Egyesült Izzó collaborator, and his team of about 40 people to carry out secret microwave experiments in the field of communications and aerial reconnaissance.
‘I would rather work on defensive than offensive weapons’
‘I took on the job with the idea that if I had to do military engineering work in what I thought was an unjust war, I would rather work on defensive than offensive weapons. But I made it a condition that I would select the necessary people myself and that they would be permanently exempt from any other military duties,’ Bay wrote in his memoir Az élet erősebb (Life is Stronger), adding that there was considerable controversy over the fact that two of the eight main staff members were Jewish.
Their achievements in the following years are also remarkable because they worked in a complete vacuum, relying only on their own research and calculations—the Germans refused to share any scientific information with them. (By the way, since we started with Oppenheimer, it is not without interest: in Az élet erősebb, we can also read about how a scientist in Budapest might have viewed the World War II race to create the atomic bomb. Bay deduced from comments dropped by a German scientist that Germany would not be able to develop the weapon and would lose the war.) By March 1944, after setting up a number of home-developed locators, Bay’s team had reached the point where they could target the ‘locating’ of the Moon—that is, capturing microwave signals reflected from the Moon’s surface. That this was even possible was still only a hypothesis, and the project had no military purpose in a strict sense. Still, József Jáky, the government commissioner for locator development, agreed to proceed with the experiment despite the worsening military situation.
In the meantime, Bay had to negotiate with the Germans occupying the Egyesült Izzó, and in the summer, to escape the frequent air raids, his group was stationed in a boarding house in Nógrádverőce, where they began their radar experiments, which were not very successful at first and were also hampered by the unstable power supply.
In September the Bay group were transferred back to the Egyesült Izzó facility in Újpest. The Arrow Cross takeover made their work impossible, and the group’s members of Jewish origin were no longer protected. Zoltán Bay tried to save them as best he could—his efforts were recognized after his death with the Righteous of the World award—, just as he did his utmost in the most chaotic weeks of the war to save Tungsram from the Germans, who were planning to evacuate the Hungarian war factories and blow them up to prevent them falling into Russian hands.
‘The Arrow Cross authorities tracked him down, and the physicist was also held in prison’
Bay also contacted Albert Szent-Györgyi and the resistance movement to defend the factory, even at gunpoint—the Arrow Cross authorities tracked him down, and the physicist was also held in the Margit Boulevard prison. The fighting in Pest had barely subsided when Bay and the others soon restarted the lunar radar project. Or rather, they would have restarted it because, in March, the Russians dismantled the factory down to the last bolt, and the radar equipment was destroyed. Within a few months a new device was built, and after a year of hard work, they made the Moon ‘answer’ on 6 February 1946.
They fell just short of world number one: just a few weeks earlier, it was announced that a similar experiment had been successfully completed in New Jersey. However, if we take into account the impossible conditions under which Bay and his colleagues had to work, we can give the first prize to our compatriots without any bias.
The physicist left Hungary in 1948 and continued his career in the United States. With his lunar radar experiment and other pioneering research abroad, he was one of the founders of radar astronomy, GPS technology, and the invention of LED light sources. He died in 1992.
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